Facebook Fellows Workshop 2016

What do these have in common: “knowing how someone’s opinions are formed”, “generating and manipulating images via generative neural networks”, and “time-travel debugging” — they are all topics discussed by the PhD Fellows at last week’s Facebook Fellowship Program research workshop, held at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.

The Facebook Fellowship Program is designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students pursuing innovative and relevant research across computer science and engineering disciplines. The 2016 Facebook Fellows were selected from over 600 applicants, representing some of the most talented researchers across computer science and engineering. A key benefit of the Facebook Fellowship program is the opportunity to engage with Facebook researchers and this research workshop is one such opportunity. At the workshop they join previous years’ Fellows and Facebook researchers for a multi-disciplinary collaborative program designed to share learning and spark new ideas.

The Fellows’ visit to Facebook kicked-off with an introduction from Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, director of Applied Machine Learning at Facebook. Joaquin’s team works in applied research in machine learning, language technologies, computer vision and computational photography—all areas that are highly relevant to the software and service experiences that we provide, and topics that are of great interest to our Fellows.

The workshop also hosted deep-dives from the Fellows to Facebook researchers in key areas such as HCI and Social Computing, Programming Languages, and Compilers and Data Mining.

“The Facebook fellowship program is designed to foster ties with emerging research leaders doing promising research in many of the challenges facing the social web and internet technology. Hosting the fellows on our campus helps open the dialog between these young researchers and our researchers, as we work together towards addressing many of the challenging problems on our journey to make the world more open and connected,” said Rebekkah Hogan, Facebook Fellowship program manager. “We’re excited to learn more about their work and expand the conversation.”

In addition to the opportunity to directly engage with Facebook researchers, the Fellows also receive two years of tuition and fees paid, a $37,000 stipend each year, and conference travel support. Aspiring future Fellows are encouraged to apply to next year’s Fellowship program. The application opens August 15, 2016. Join us!